Bilge Ebiri

His Three Daughters is a movie about waiting, and it’s a movie that often feels like it’s waiting — for death, for reconciliation, for a confrontation, for something, anything.

The End is a bold swing, and I’m glad it exists. But for all the stuff it throws at us, the film is frustratingly, wearingly one-note.

Mackenzie and his cast dance around and through this drama so elegantly and delicately that the twisty, generic ending feels like even more of a letdown than it might have in a more ordinary picture. The details are not worth getting into, but Relay is the rare movie where I might recommend leaving ten minutes before the end.

When it succeeds, it’s impressive. But it also can’t hold a candle to Wilson’s original, and it can’t reconcile the fundamental tension between theater and film.

Girls Will Be Girls is a modest work, but like some of the greatest films, it comes to vivid life before our eyes.

Berger’s film is adapted, quite faithfully, from Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, and it combines the pulp velocity of a great airport read with the gravitas of high drama.

The pressures of the untamed setting, combined with the inability of these characters to ever trust each other, results in an over-the-top melodrama that gets loopier as it goes on. But it pulls us along, too.

With The Wild Robot, Sanders has found another way to create a visual dissonance that almost subconsciously insinuates its way into our brains and feeds the central idea of the film. And it’s hypnotic.

The movie goes in circles, constantly expounding on the same things. It has lots of insight, but little momentum. Then again, maybe that’s the idea.

I never really bought the onscreen relationship in We Live in Time, in part because I could constantly feel the movie trying too hard. The love story is syrupy, and the tragedy even more syrupy.

Even at their bleakest, Leigh’s pictures and his people explode with life. Some filmmakers make movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute cinema if the art form ever vanished. Mike Leigh makes movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute humanity if we ever vanished.

The film manages to be both intelligent and visceral.

It feels like both a summary and a homecoming for this strangest and most American of directors.

The Apprentice is a hodgepodge of scenes from the life of Trump and Cohn with little emotional fluidity.

Saturday Night might not be factually accurate, but it feels spiritually true.

Reagan is pure hagiography, but it’s not even one of those convincing hagiographies that pummel you into submission with compelling scenes that reinforce their subject’s greatness. Sean McNamara’s film has slick surfaces, but it’s so shallow and one-note that it actually does Ronald Reagan a disservice.

Ortiz’s film does have its charms.

Somehow there’s nothing cynical about it. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is, instead, a return to form that finds Burton and much of the previous cast getting weird, gross, and, yes, goth in both an idyllic New England town and a gleefully bureaucratic afterlife.

It skips the florid romanticism, the thick atmosphere, the grand mythmaking, opting instead for a breezy, silly modesty. It’s fun, ridiculous, and deliriously violent in its own right.

Alien: Romulus is diverting enough, but it’s also instantly forgettable — something I don’t think I’ve ever said about any other Alien film, good or bad.

The accrual of human detail pays off masterfully when we get to the dance itself — especially when the girls see their fathers for the first time.

The real problem with Jackpot! (aside from the inept direction, the unfunny script, and the irritating characters) is that the whole film indulges in a kind of misanthropy that would require a lot more thought and ballsiness to pull off.

This movie feels like it’s been shredded to bits, stripped clean of personality and character and coherence, presumably in an effort to get it short enough to sneak in some additional screening times.

Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t a particularly good movie — I’m not even sure it is a movie — but it’s so determined to beat you down with its incessant irreverence that you might find yourself submitting to it.

Their story seems genuine, but the filmmaking can make it all feel premeditated, in part because directors Jeff Zimbalist and Maria Bukhonina are determined to hit every plot turn at the most obvious points.

Not quite a history lesson and not quite a rom-com and certainly not an epic, the movie is a mild but pleasant mishmash of genres held together by the sheer charisma of Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson, two actors who seem unexpectedly well suited to each other’s energies.

Longlegs is terrifying for much of its running time, and it should satisfy most genre fiends. But the greatness that earlier seemed well within its grasp eludes it by the end.

Daddio is a classic two-hander, focusing entirely on the seesawing power dynamic between two very different individuals. As such, it’s at times theatrical and precious, a bit too on the nose with its metaphors and symbols and running themes. But boy, can it be fun to watch these two go at it.